


you're my paradox, baby

by baehj2915



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe, Angst and Humor, De-Aged Derek Hale, First Time, Gen, Jossed, M/M, Magic, Multi, POV First Person, Time Travel, sort of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-27
Updated: 2013-05-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 02:55:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/819145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baehj2915/pseuds/baehj2915
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The kid, which was sure as shit a Derek Hale, but a Derek Hale operating system one-point-zero. With the original casing in bondy blue. A Derek Hale precursor, minus the gratuitously butch arm and shoulder muscles. A Derek Hale beta version. The breakthrough album that was just more simple and streamlined than the later ones. The youthful, more lissome Skipper to the older, more stacked Derek’s Malibu Barbie. </i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <i>“Jesus Christ, Stilinski finally broke. He’s muttering about Barbies.”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	you're my paradox, baby

**Author's Note:**

> This is essentially a canon AU. It deals with the events of seasons 1 and 2 as they happened, but mentions the Alpha pack stuff as recent history. Because I started writing this a while ago with intention of doing some Alpha pack stuff, but I didn't really want to. 
> 
> So basically, there's magic time travel. Things happen. It's awesome/horrible/inconvenient/obvious plot device. Delete as applicable. 
> 
> Also ~WARNING~ the sex parts come in later chapters, but it will be there. Between two under 18 characters, which is why I used the archive warning.

After waiting a sufficient enough time for the… person… to not, you know, explode into a pile of viscera due to the paradox that was very clearly being created by its—his, no, its--it was definitely safer—existence, my horror subsided. Slightly. I started to wonder about how, then how, and how, with another side of _how_. Some tired, old-mannish part of my brain, clearly Dad-like in origin, fed up with shit long before werewolves were a thing, sighed and politely directed me to the toilet drain of All Answers To Everything Weird Nowadays Really: magic, dummy. 

So horror surged back into its rightful place at the front of my face. 

“What? No. Wait, what? No! No… _what?!_ ” 

It, he… The dude. The kid-dude-who-came-out-of-fucking-nowhere-good-obviously frowned in a ludicrously and hilariously familiar way, but really so much sadder on reflection, and with much less beleaguered hatred for all the world and the things in it. 

The kid said, with a voice that was both oddly lighter and hysterically same-y, “Um… what’s going on? Who? Is? That?” 

In all honesty, there could have been about twenty to thirty extra question marks there and I would have still been relatively understating the amount of questioning going in the kid’s tone. And eyes. And body language. And probably in his fucking little werewolfy soul. 

He was pointing, of course, at himself. 

I couldn’t help himself from muttering, “Twilight Zone.” Which earned me a grumpy, frowny glare from Derek. 

The old one. The regular one. Not the new one. 

The kid, which was sure as shit a Derek Hale, but a Derek Hale operating system one-point-zero. With the original casing in bondy blue. A Derek Hale precursor, minus the gratuitously butch arm and shoulder muscles. A Derek Hale beta version. The breakthrough album that was just more simple and streamlined than the later ones. The youthful, more lissome Skipper to the older, more stacked Derek’s Malibu Barbie. 

“Jesus Christ, Stilinski finally broke. He’s muttering about Barbies.” 

Trust Jackson to see another freaking version of a person he knows, standing in front of _that same person he knows_ , and focus instead on being a raging ball sack. 

I flipped him off without bothering to look him in the face, keeping my eyes on the situation with the two Dereks—with the kid and Derek. Because, really, who was to say it really was a baby!Derek? It could be some kind of Doctor Who-esque alien playing a trick on… a bunch of… teenaged werewolves skating through life by the skin of their fangs with their trusty, human comedic support. So no, that wasn’t likely. But technically speaking, magic hadn’t been likely either and see what happened there? 

Now I was turning into Fox Mulder. Except without all the foxiness, which was highly unfair. In more than one way, because, if anything, I wanted to be the Scully in that situation. 

Except for the ovaries. 

But who wouldn’t want to be a super intelligent, in-control redheaded skeptic with nice skin and the ability to quip drolly? Okay, so maybe I wanted to _bang_ the Scully in said situation. Would anyone blame me? Or maybe bask in her awesomeness and hope to be allowed to look at her. Realistically, I was going to be more like one of the Lone Gunman than anyone else, but that was beside the point. 

The point was there was a freaking teenage Baby Derek looking aghast and pained and weirded out, standing in front of me and my gang of werewolves, and pointing a confused finger at his older, über-macho doppelganger. Because the abs may have been the difference between normal and _punishing your body because you hate yourself_ , but their faces were totally the same. 

Well, mostly the same. 

Baby Derek did not have any stubble to speak of, awesomely dark and carefully landscaped or not. The edges of his face were softer and much less like he was designed out of The Masculine Book of Angular Man Faces. His head didn’t look as big. But the eyes and the nose and the mouth were the same. It was only that Regular Derek didn’t look as… I really wanted to say cute, but not as much as I didn’t want to say it.

Regular Derek had obviously catapulted past cute into the realm of impossible, mythical hotness. Like it-is-actually-inconvenient-to-be-this-hot-and-causes-genuine-problems hotness. 

I didn’t want to say that either. 

Baby Derek was more like a… puppy. 

“What? What’s going on? Why are you…?” Baby Derek said in horror. 

Regular Derek growled. Out right growled at his baby self. Which was, whoa, unusual. Regular Derek was all kinds of exasperated and snippy and shouty twenty-four seven, but he didn’t, like, get into his animal nature unless he was about to rip somebody open. But there it was, this sub vocal sound. He didn’t make any faces or start to wolf out; it just emanated tightly from his throat. 

“What’s the last thing you remember?” 

Baby Derek floundered in adorable confusion. God, such a puppy. I was reevaluating everything he knew about Derek. Or at least planning comments for future teasing opportunities. 

“I was just. School? I don’t know. It was a normal day. I woke up. I went to school. I don’t remember. What’s happening?” 

“How old are you?” 

“Dude, you can’t tell?” I interrupted, unable to stop it, as I was with most things that I said. 

Derek huffed, but didn’t turn his head, still glaring at Baby Derek. And seriously, I was starting to actually, visually see the psychological weirdness multiply like scrubbing bubbles. Who sees a younger version of themselves and moves straight past confusion and novelty self-boning quandaries into unmasked hatred? Seriously, who—ooohhhhh. 

Awkward. Sad. Sad and awkward. 

“Fifteen,” Baby Derek said, obviously unsure if he should continue being confused or start getting angry. 

Derek sighed and gripped the bridge of his nose. “Okay, here’s the deal. You are—“

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” I said, skidding over to Regular Derek and throwing my arms up to both signal discontent and possibly shield a blow. Derek was a wild card when it came to the hitting. “What are you going to tell him? You can’t tell him… things.”

Derek looked at me like I was a burden, but that was how Derek looked at everyone really. What was special about the typical look he gave me was that it was also laden with more than a few analytical layers of _what in the ever living fuck are you_. I like to feel like that was an accomplishment in some way, coming from a real life mythical creature.

“Why not?”

“Because that could, like, rip apart the fabric of time. One of you could explode.” 

That look, that _what in the ever living fuck are you_ look, only multiplied. With a very weary incredulity, which, good job for pulling that off, Derek sighed a heavy, “What?” 

I looked around the room for support, but everyone looked as confused as Baby Derek or as confused as Regular Derek. There were two different types of confused happening and everybody had it. Well, Scott was Regular Derek level confused, which was so telling in a way that Scott would totally hate if I told him. Scott was super in denial about how similar he was to Derek. Isaac and Boyd were Baby-Derek-confused. And Jackson was already looking bored. Because of course he was. 

The crux was that nobody was going to back me up on this. 

“This is obviously a paradox!” I shouted, starting to get upset that no one else was worried about the short-term safety of the universe here. “This is a contradiction in existence! You can’t tell him things he doesn’t know, ‘cause then it might, like, blip you out of existence. Or him! And then consequently you, because he’s you before like ten years ago! This is the Grandfather paradox. Except more like the Twentysomething paradox, but I’m pretty sure you could mess up your own shit pretty bad.”

“Stiles,” Derek said, like that did anything. Derek’s Alphaness did not control me, yet he continued to think it might. Sad. 

“He could unmake you.” I nodded along emphatically with the statement to indicate that it should really be really important if the word _unmake_ wasn’t significant enough. “Has no one here ever seen any sci fi at all? Never engage your double. It’s just going to be bad.” 

“I don’t think this is the same thing,” Boyd said. 

Derek looked at me as if to say _obviously_. Derek did a lot of his communication by face, mostly in the eyebrows. To be fair, they were pretty spectacular. Which, I also noted, was another difference between Baby Derek and Regular Derek. Baby Derek’s eyebrows were a little weaker, a little less formed. 

“This isn’t _Star Trek_ , Stiles. That’s not evil Derek. My eyes aren’t going to burn out of my skull. It’s just magic.” 

“Kay, first, obviously, you would be his evil twin. Second, _just_ magic? Listen to that for a second. Third! You still can’t tell him anything. What about the respect for singular linear timelines, here? Grandfather paradox!” 

“Nobody knows what that means, freak,” Jackson said. A completely out of line thing for someone to say who was inspecting his grody werewolf nails. 

None of these damn werewolves had any sense of perspective. 

“That’s due to a tragically unimaginative education system, which we can discuss at a later date. The Grandfather paradox is the time travel paradox that negates involvement in your own timeline. You can’t go back in time to kill your own grandfather because then he’s no longer your grandfather and you are breaking the laws of reality. You shouldn’t exist if you have no grandfather. Basically his existence here threatens yours. If he dies, you’ll have died as a fifteen-year-old. Then what happens? What if he, I don’t know, gets his arms trapped in a combine harvester? He’s you. He’s a baby you. What will happen to your arms?” 

Really, I shouldn’t have expected anything other than stone-faced rejection of my valid reasoning, but I was still offended that Derek didn’t seem to be in the slightest way moved. 

Scott, finally relaxing from a state of alarm, leaned back against the broke down railway car in confusion. “Why would you kill your own grandfather?”

Isaac turned his head to Scott fondly. “It’s a metaphor. It doesn’t apply only to murder. Like, if you caused anything to happen to result in your grandfather’s death it would still stop you from being born.” 

Boyd added, “But that’s only if you go back in time. If anything, that Derek is coming forward in time.” 

“Oh my god!” Derek snapped, his voice doing that angry valley girl thing that made me laugh sometimes. “All of you shut up. Stop speculating about,” Derek paused to shake his head resentfully and purse his lips in angry, but oddly pretty way, “freaking paradoxes.” 

“Yeah, okay,” I said, maybe stamping my feet a little, because really, every one was being super chill about this, “but what happens when he returns to his timeline with knowledge he never should have learned? What if there are people running around in,” I paused for some quick math and then didn’t want to, “eight years ago, going, ‘uh oh where’s Derek? Probably not in the future because that’s dumb.’ Are you suddenly remembering any time when you were fifteen and your parents thought you were missing for an extended period of time?” 

Baby Derek had, apparently, had enough of the speculation and lack of answers. He chose that moment to freak out a little, which was weird. I had never seen Derek freak out, not really. When faced with trouble, Derek had always been a wall of calm disdain or a purposeful shift into werewolfhood to attack the problem claws-first. This seemed more like in the first few days of Scott’s wolviness. Suddenly there were visible fangs and a cro magnon brow and the full mutton chop swinging. Baby Derek didn’t have the Regular Derek hiss-growl thing down though. Even as a Beta, Regular Derek had had a pretty wicked werewolf roar.

And by wicked, I clearly meant awful and unappealing. 

“What’s going on?” Baby Derek yelled, voice kind of cracking. “Why am I here? Why am I—Why are you the Alpha? Why can’t I feel anyone? Who are these people? Why do you smell like that? Where’s Dad? Where’s Mom?” 

Everyone sort of froze while all that sort of sunk in. Baby Derek was pre-fire. That made everything a lot more weird and complicated. And tragic. And there was really a lot going on with Regular Derek’s face. Like he couldn’t decide which emotion was the most important because he was feeling all of them. 

Scott cleared his throat and stood up straighter, looking at the Betas and me and gesturing to outside the abandoned rail station. Well, really, any place away from the tragic and awkward mess that was Derek Hale finding out his whole family had died in a fire. Again. Isaac and Boyd were looking to Derek for some confirmation, comfort, something. I wasn’t really sure. Derek was looking only at the younger version of himself. Scott walked over and pulled on Isaac’s sleeve, pulling him out with Boyd following reluctantly. Scott looked at me pointedly. I nodded, but hung back from the werewolf train for a minute. 

I stepped in close to Derek and said, “Are you sure you should…?” I made a gesture that I hoped and apparently did effectively communicate the phrase _tell your younger paradox doppelganger about the tragic murder of everyone you ever loved_. 

Derek sighed tiredly. Noticeably more tired than usual. The kind of tired, besieged sigh my dad could only dream of conveying, which was saying a lot. 

“He can feel it, Stiles. I don’t have a choice.” 

I stole a look back at Baby Derek. Even through wolfish tissue I could see the blatant worry and expectation on his face. I knew that kind of expectation—where you know something bad is happening and you’re only holding out hope that some unannounced good news will change everything. 

I nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, I guess. Just…” 

I wanted to say something like _go easy on him_ , but wasn’t sure why. There was some definite feeling on the dislike/hate/tear-your-fucking-face-off continuum coming from Regular Derek to his baby self. Maybe that was it. Maybe I had been on the receiving end of the Bad News talk before and there was just a lump of pointless, undirected empathy in my chest that I wanted to do something with, even if I didn’t know how. I knew nothing I could say would matter the moment after he was going to hear what he was about to hear. 

But it wasn’t like Derek and I were friends in the traditional sense. We were emergency buddies. Pending mortality pals. I figured Derek was Derek’s business. 

Maybe that was a cop-out, but it was one of the many shitty-yet-true cop-outs of life. Case in point, the police can’t do anything about a domestic dispute unless it’s reported, ensuring that if some douchebag really wants and puts their ingenuity towards locking their kid in a freezer, it’s going to happen. Some people use their pain and trauma as an excuse to murder their perceived enemies with a lizard monster. Some psychopaths are raised by psychopaths and set some innocent family on fire for being not-exactly-human. And I couldn’t… Nothing can stop those things.

It really wasn’t my place. 

So I flattened my hand through my hair and retreated out of there. 

After twenty-two of the most awkward minutes of my life, Derek came out of the rail station, looking disgruntled and pissed, with Baby Derek following behind him like a shorter, less hairy, skinny mirror image. Baby Derek looked disgruntled, pissed, and like his whole life had been taken away from him in about the span of twenty-two minutes. 

“Keys,” Derek snapped at Boyd, who whipped them over faster than I had ever seen keys thrown. He pointed at the Camaro, looking at Baby Derek. “Get in.” 

Baby Derek stopped in his tracks. I had to hand it to him. He was obviously fighting off a major breakdown. His face was white, but blotchy around the cheeks and nose. His eyes were glassy and red-rimmed. He was holding his lips together like he was afraid something was going to come out of his mouth. But he still held it together long enough to think. 

“Where are we going? You said the house was…” 

“We are going to the house. We’re going to ask Uncle Peter what he thinks is going on and how to fix it.” 

I had to resist the urge to roll his eyes. Yeah, that’d go great. Not that anyone ever listened to me, but if they did, I’d tell them letting Uncle freaking Zombie exist as a reservoir of vital information was such a huge mistake it might as well have been a flashing neon sign that spelled out _mistake_ in eight foot letters. 

Baby Derek shook his head. “This doesn’t make any sense. Why isn’t Uncle Peter the Alpha? Why would the hunters come after—“

“Just shut the fuck up and get in the fucking car!” 

Whoa. 

I had seen Derek scary before. Looming and scary. Violent and scary. Wolfed out and scary. Not the way regular humans can be scary—with unabashed frustration and hatred. That was some sort of terrible, abusive parent scream. That was a scream that felt, possibly, eight years in the making and had been hiding behind Derek’s typically cool and well-packaged anger. 

It kind of put Derek’s other acts of aggression in perspective. 

Baby Derek looked a little conflicted and resentful, but mostly like he was going to cry while trying really hard not to. I was so ridiculously, stupidly familiar with that look it felt like being punched in the gut to see it on someone else’s face. Metaphorically. Because I’d been actually punched in the gut for the first time in recent memory, as well as kicked, and that was a less emotional experience than an inability-to-breath experience. 

Isaac, Jackson, and Boyd had the drawn eyebrows of holy-fuck-never-make-him-make-that-sound-again. And Scott, after his moment of surprise wore off, looked like he was making another update to his mental list of _Reasons I Will Always Hate Derek, Always and Forever, Always_. Because Baby Derek may have been Derek, but he was also a confused and scared kid brought out of his natural place and time for reasons that were probably our fault. 

“Fuck,” I said as a mutter, but, of course, werewolves. “Why doesn’t Baby Derek ride with me and Scott? You take the Betas and you’ll just… That’d be easier, right?” 

Derek nodded, already moving to climb into the driver’s seat of the Camaro. Of course he didn’t say anything, and it looked like it had been physically painful for him to nod, but still. It made me feel a little proud. Which was kind of pathetic. When all the wolves had piled in, Derek drove off, burning rubber. 

Baby Derek probably wasn’t happy about being left with two strangers who weren’t exactly pack, but he probably was less happy about finding out everyone in his family was dead save for one psychopathic uncle. Derek had probably left the psychopathic part out though. He looked between Scott and me not quite nervously. Because, again, he just found out his whole family died. In a fire. In a planned murder. 

I really felt that could never be stressed enough. 

Scott looked uncomfortable. “You didn’t have to do that.” 

“It’s alright.” I shrugged, curious for the millionth time about how far werewolf lie detection sense went. How much harder was it to tell for subtle lies? Lies of omission? Did your heart beat faster when you weren’t lying with words? “Thought it would be safer to keep them apart.”

“Dude, I don’t think Derek is going to, like, poof out of existence.” 

I thought about saying something, but pulled back at the last second. “Better safe than covered in intestines.” 

Baby Derek’s nose twitched all rabbitty at that.

“Sorry,” I said, opening the door for him. 

Baby Derek was quiet for the whole ride over, which was reasonable. I kept looking at his face in the rearview mirror. He’d go into this cycle of getting sadder and sadder, where his face would darken and I thought he was gong to start crying. Then he’d look up and remember he was wedged between two strangers in a Jeep and his face would go blank again. At some point, Scott started filling in the uncomfortable silence with how good Isaac was doing at the Vet’s. Which, ugh. 

It was totally weird to share the front seat with not only someone not Scott, but someone who I knew but wasn’t who I knew at all. It was kind of a mindfuck. So I chose not to think about two versions of the same person with different experiences existing in the same place and what that meant about alternate histories and timelines, and instead thought about how weirdly small Baby Derek was. He wasn’t even that small. He was actually about my size. A little shorter maybe. But I’d kind of been holding out hope that Derek was just naturally a brick shit house who had always been meaty. Nope. Turned out underneath all that chest and shoulders was just someone with fewer underwear model muscles. 

Looking at Baby Derek’s legs and arms, I’d have guessed even he outweighed me by about five pounds or so. Whereas I knew from Derek’s rap sheet, and from carrying his heavy werewolf ass in the pool, that Regular Derek outweighed me by at least forty pounds, probably closer to fifty. 

Somewhere from fifteen to twenty-three Derek bulked the frig up. 

Somewhere from fifteen to twenty-three Derek gained total control over his wolfing out, but lost something else, a lot of something elses really, along the way. 

I also tried not to think about what that meant, and what that revealed about Derek’s character. I didn’t want to know things about Derek’s character. 

Not interested. 

Before we got up to the long, woodland driveway, I could sort of feel the air getting tighter. Of course, Baby Derek was sitting next to me, looking ill and pale and nervous. I shot a look to Scott, who just gave me a sad and confused shrug. 

“So, I don’t know exactly what Derek told you, but… They’re fixing up the house, I guess. But it’s in bad shape.” 

“Burned down,” he said. His voice sounded like broken glass. 

I nodded, having a rare moment where it felt like words were leaving me, instead of flying at me. “Yeah. Just so it’s not, not a big surprise. Don’t…” 

“Don’t get my hopes up,” Derek deadpanned. 

I looked at him, turning up the gravel drive, and nodded. 

The closer we got to the house Baby Derek got tenser. Not like I could blame him. I’d be freaking out a lot more that just sitting up straighter in petrified silence. I quickly slammed the door that led to all the memories of little Stilinski tantrums in the cancer ward and angrily breaking shit just because I could. Baby Derek’s claws weren’t out, but he was digging his fingers into his thighs like he wanted to rip a chunk out. 

The Hale mansion, or Burnt Down Hovel of Doom and Sadness, the official title, was actually fairing a little better than it had been since Derek came back to Beacon Hills, but repairs were slow to come. Repairs would naturally be slow to come when most of the inhabitants—well, let’s be honest, Derek— seemed not to care too much about living the semi-rugged half-camping lifestyle. But it was still a once functioning mansion formerly filled with living people that was now a mostly burnt out pile of sorrow and probably, with the way things were plotting out, super angry ghosts. 

When it came into full view, Baby Derek whimpered. 

I swore. I could handle freaking out. Attempts to rip my Jeep apart. Attempts to rip me apart. I was less copasetic with crying and sad puppy mewls of mourning and defeat. 

As we pulled to a stop, Scott gave me a distressed, imploring look. He could probably hear the heartbroken whimper at decibels my puny human ears couldn’t and it made him sad. I rolled my eyes. For the first two months or so of Scott’s upgrade to werewolf, he was still shitty about a lot of things. But once he kicked his little werewolf ass into gear, he really took to the mantle of All Around Number One Good Guy Fuck Yeah with gusto. He was generally falling over his charmingly uneven jaw line to help people. Just not so much Derek. Apparently, even if Derek was Baby Derek. 

Baby Derek was staring at the destroyed house so intently I could almost see the gears turning in his head. If it were me, at least, I’d be imagining what happened. The details—the time it would have taken, how it went down, how long it took for everyone to realize they were trapped, and how much air they had. Nothing good was happening inside his head at that moment. 

“Hey,” I said, probably not as softly or as nicely as you were supposed to when someone had just gotten Bad News. I had always hated that tone anyway. I put my hand on his shoulder and to my surprise he didn’t jump or pull away. “You don’t have to go in there. You can stay in the Jeep if you want. We’ll talk to Derek and Peter.” 

Baby Derek’s eyes were still on the cusp of big fat tears, but he shook his head. “I want to see my Uncle.” 

I sucked in a breath and probably made a gross face. “Erm, yeah. What did Derek tell you about him?” 

“He-he was in a coma. And he’s, like, weird now. He healed wrong.” 

“Is that all he said?” Scott added. 

“No. He said he was dangerous, but he’s not now and that’s why I’m—the other Derek is the Alpha. Uncle Peter was sick from the fire. Like, mentally.” 

I sighed. I didn’t really think Derek would go too far into the details. That would’ve taken a lot longer than twenty-two minutes. Also, Derek’s emotional issues could have filled that freaking abandoned train station, so it wasn’t likely he was going to open up to a younger version of himself from a weird time dimension portal unlocked by some as yet unknown magic. So, no, probably not. Generally speaking what he said was the truth, but, like, the bare bones of the truth. The truth’s gruesome closet-skeleton. 

“Yeah,” I said. “Just… don’t take everything Peter says as the word of god, you know what I mean?” 

Baby Derek looked directly at me, trustingly, and nodded, and holy shit did I neither want nor expect that. His eyes were all bright from almost-crying a lot and multi-colored from genetics. It was very pretty and uncomfortable to look at. I basically had to turn away as quickly as humanly possible. 

As soon as we stepped inside the remodeled, mostly functioning kitchen, and Peter’s devious, way-too-amused-by-things-that-aren’t eyes narrowed in on Baby Derek, I kind of wanted to pull him back out. The kid’s face lit up a bit before taking a sniff and being reeled back into confusion. 

“Uncle Peter?” 

“Hm, this is quite the conundrum. I couldn’t begin to think what kind of spell would do this, but I’m more curious about the why than the how.” 

“Uncle Peter?” Baby Derek tried again and more sadly. Ugh. I kind of wanted to die. 

I felt my whole upper body tighten, like I was gearing up to take a swing at Peter if he fucked with Baby Derek. And, Jesus fucking Christ, did I not need my body betraying me in a house full of werewolves. 

Peter’s head tilted to the side, like he was finally seeing that there was a person there. “I’m aware that you probably want more answers than you’ve been given, but I’ve been put on a leash, as it were. It’s probably for the best that you not get too involved in what’s happening here. Stiles agrees with me on this, I’m told. Don’t you, Stiles?”

Even though I did, and that had already been hugely fucked up by the fact that Baby Derek was a werewolf and could sense that his whole pack was dead, I was hesitant to admit that. I was always hesitant to agree with Peter. Even when I knew I was right. What’s worse was that Peter seemed to use our agreements—which happened way more often than I was comfortable with—to validate his opinions. Derek usually treated it as such. Or he was at least learning to. 

It was extremely uncomfortable and I couldn’t really glean what he was trying to accomplish by doing it.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said warily. 

Peter grinned his stupid, creepy douchebag grin. “Tell me the last week of your recollection.” 

While Peter tried to get a pin on what time Baby Derek was yanked out of, I used his distraction to look around on his laptop, trying to memorize as much of it as I could. Peter let me glance at it occasionally, but unfettered access was not allowed. If Peter thought I didn’t know he was doling out information to me like some drug dealer—controlling the source, making me dependent—he had another thing coming. I memorized as best I could and kept it in my head so later I could regurgitate it into word docs on my computer. It wasn’t perfect, but until I could sneak away from him with a memory stick it was all I could do. 

But apparently I became a little too invested in this weird history of Bulgarian witches and their man-harems, because the next thing I knew there was loud clattering and Derek was bringing back his angry outside rage voice from before. 

Except this time it was Baby Derek. His voice was high, right on the edge of hysteria. He was wolfed out again and breathing heavy. Derek was standing tall with a bad strange, bright-eyed energy—the kind you saw when someone really wanted to fight. Scott was kind of freaked out in between them, looking as unsure as I did. And Peter was hanging back a little, observing like it was slightly peculiar but amusing. Because of course he was. 

Baby Derek stepped up to Derek like he was going to take a swipe, but Scott pulled him back. Which was good. Because Baby Derek had, like, a third of the muscle mass of Regular Derek. 

“What the hell, man?” I shouted, at no one in particular really. Just, what the hell? “I start reading for five minutes and you failwolves get your claws out?” 

Derek gave me his Srs Bizness angry look. As opposed to any other angry look. Delineation was necessary. There were too many to just use angry all the time. Also angry is only one aspect and it doesn’t give you any insight into how dangerous that angry could be. Derek’s Srs Bizness angry face wasn’t likely to lead to violence, but it would lead to super awkward, determined silence and intense glaring. 

“I think he’s having trouble adjusting,” Scott said, not entirely helpfully. 

“He should be able to control himself,” Derek said, even less helpfully. 

“Well, golly gee, Sherlock, I wonder why he can’t,” I said, motioning to the poorly furnished kitchen and the blackened floorboards beyond. 

Derek didn’t say anything or otherwise show he wanted to punch a hole through my skull, but his nostrils did flare. “It’s none of your business, Stiles. You and Scott can go home now.” 

Peter raised his super affected douchebag eyebrows. “We’re hosting yet another hormonal teenage werewolf? Wonderful.” 

I threw up my hands in disgust. “Dude, he’s family.” I wheeled around and pointed at Derek. “You’d think there’d be a little less animosity here. He’s freaking you.”

“I’m not him!” Baby Derek yelled. He growled too but it was more of a sad, pathetic growl than an I’m-gonna-fuck-your-shit-up growl. “I couldn’t—I can’t be—“ 

“Scott, get him out of here. Beat some sense into him before I do.”

Scott, still holding a progressively angrier Baby Derek, stopped indignantly for a moment and because I was Scott-psychic I knew what he was going to say. He always felt the need to distinguish himself from Derek’s pack, even it was inopportune—especially if it was inopportune. Because Scott had principles and I got tired of principles sometimes. Which is probably why I agreed with Peter too often. Huh. 

I waved Scott off and started marching toward him, tentatively trying to push back on Baby Derek’s shoulder. 

“Yeah, yeah. Nobody owns you. You’re a strong female character. We know. Can we just separate these two right now though?” 

Once we pushed Baby Derek out the door, careful to avoid the claws, or at least I was, he pushed himself away from us. It looked more like a fall. He went down to his knees and covered his head with clawed hands like he was expecting a tornado. Even I could hear his raspy, wet breathing so it was pretty obvious he was crying. Scott had a weird look on his face, conflicted and sad. He started to turn toward me, but I threw my hand in his face. 

Because, yeah, Scott-psychic. 

“Don’t even give me puppy eyes.” 

“Stiles,” he said, with a little whine to his voice. It was really all I needed to hear. 

Scott was Scott. Which meant he wanted to help and be nice, but it was also Derek, so he really didn’t want to do any of that. There was also a touch of _but Stiles you can do this because you have a dead parent_ , which, you know, F that S right in the B. Except that was totally subtext to something Scott didn’t even know I thought about so I couldn’t really blame him. 

I sighed. “Yeah, I’ll deal with this and you go finish up in there.” 

Scott looked really relieved in a way he probably wasn’t aware. A lot of his Derek-related feelings were psychologically revealing like that. 

So I was left with the awkward responsibility of, what, fixing Baby Derek? Considering the regular one I didn’t like my chances. At least I could get him to stop crying, or stop trying to murder Regular Derek. Maybe. Then I looked back at the partially destroyed house and he’d just come out of a time portal where everyone was alive and not terrible and no. No, I couldn’t. 

I sat down next to him. I could still hear snotty breathing, but his shoulders went tense, trying to rein in the sobbing. It was really the last thing I wanted to be doing, but I couldn’t just do nothing. 

He was really pathetic. 

“You don’t need to stop. You know. Doing that. Just ‘cause I’m here. You can keep. Doing that.” 

His wolf nails moved into his hair and pulled. “He doesn’t care. Why? My whole pack is dead and he doesn’t care. What’s wrong with him?” 

Part of me wanted to put a hand on his shoulder or give him a hug, but I wasn’t my Dad and we didn’t have that kind of relationship. “Look, I can’t pretend to know what you’ve gone through today. But Derek… It’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s just that he went through it too. Derek is… broken. I really don’t think not feeling things is his problem. Sometimes if you come out of this huge, massive freaking disaster you can’t be the same person anymore. And I don’t think he knows how to be a normal person anymore. I don’t even know all the details, but I do know the end result. I think it’s just his way of staying safe.” 

It kind of felt like I stumbled into a little bit of truth in my bullshitting. Maybe. Huh. 

Baby Derek sat up a little, looking at me and pulling his knees to his chest. I don’t know if he was trying to be surreptitious, but he quick wiped his face on his jeans. Even if he was, his voice was thick and waterlogged. “It’s not fair. He won’t even tell me how or why—What happened? My whole family is just dead and I’m here for no reason and I’m supposed to just live with it? It’s not fair!” 

He was starting to get a little animated, werewolf claws clutching at air and some heat starting to show up behind his heavy werewolf brow. His upper lip curled up exposing a little more fang. I manfully refrained from throwing myself out of his way, even though my hindbrain was lighting up with all kinds of prey instincts in the presence of a traumatized and emotional teenage apex predator. 

But nearly half a year of getting my ass kicked and saving the furry little asses of so-called apex predators had made it ridonkulously easy for me to ignore my fight or flight responses. Scott claimed they were never that strong anyway. 

“Yeah, well, no. It’s not fair.” 

I had made about seventeen rounds cycling over a sideways figure eight in the dirt with my finger when Baby Derek snapped, in a voice much more reminiscent of Regular Derek, “That’s it? That’s all you can say!” 

I was pretty sure there was an interibang in there somewhere. 

At least he was pulling in some more typical anger, and losing those freaking sad puppy-face-cry-eyes that were definitely not breaking my heart. Or at least it was Regular Derek typical. Which, I realized, wasn’t necessarily Baby Derek typical. If I were making educated guesses, which is definitely what I was in the business of doing, the fire was obviously the focal point that turned little puppy Derek Hale, capable of crying in front of strangers, into the failwolf Alpha I knew and… didn’t even really know that well. Not surprising, considering it was fairly obvious now he was using a wall of muscle and poor communication skills to hide a lot of emotional fragility and trauma. 

God. Damn. It. 

“Do I have to put _not learning things about Derek_ on my freaking to-do list?” 

“What?” 

“Nothing. Okay, so yeah, that’s it. That’s everything. It’s not fair and it blows major ass. Believe me, I know. You wake up and find out your family is… It sucks. And it feels like this weight is pressing down on your chest and… It isn’t fair. I don’t have anything else to offer you except that I’m sorry for you. I really am. I’m sorry and it’s painful and it’s shit, but I think, after a while, it still hurts, but it gets a little easier to breathe.” 

After a long beat, Baby Derek breathed in heavily. “So, so… what now? What do I do? Why am I even here? Am I going to be like… Is that what I am now?” 

He didn’t have to point or say he was thinking of Regular Derek. What I knew as Derek, and what he knew as a horrifying, Dickensian look into a terrible future. 

“Look, don’t worry about him. Just be yourself.”

Baby Derek’s face scrunched up dubiously, which was kind of hilarious given that he was all wolfed out still. 

“Bluh, that was stupid, but you know what I mean.” 

“I’m not sure I do.” 

“I mean,” I stalled, spinning my hand around as though I could give him the answer via gesturing. “I mean you Dereks are two different people. As evidenced by the fact that world did not dissolve due to the obvious paradox of the same person existing in two forms at the same point in the same timeline. Ergo, you are two different people. Boom. Multiple timelines.” 

“I don’t—“

I cut him off with a noise. “That’s how we’re explaining it. We’re operating under that assumption or _my_ head will explode. Anywho, you and him are different people now. From the point you came here and found this out, it made you a different person. So don’t worry about Re—Other Derek. He’s not you. You can’t account for him. Be yourself.” 

I actually hoped the bullshit I was throwing out was true. Not only to resolve the whole time travel paradox conflict, but also to take some pressure off the kid’s shoulders. Baby Derek didn’t say anything to reject or embrace the idea. He just sat there while the werewolf features slid off his body and he looked like a sad, pensive kid again. 

We sat there for hours. Well, minutes, but for me even not awkward silences feel like forever. Not that it was super awkward, at least probably not for him. It was more somber, which wasn’t surprising, but I’d never been good at respecting gravitas. I couldn’t leave, though. I could feel the tension in his body release slightly when I slid my leg toward him, and increase when I leaned away. 

I had no idea why. His grown-up version didn’t even like me that much, though I was pretty sure that might only encourage Baby Derek. Maybe he just felt so alone that anyone, any body near him, felt friendly. It wasn’t as though Regular Derek shied away from physical contact. It was just that his was usually the aggressive, superficial kind—claps on the shoulder, grabbing by the scruff of the neck, shoving, kicking the betas down—but subconsciously easy. It was like contact was something natural and necessary, but that need had been turned into something violent he didn’t know how to use properly. 

God.

Shitting. 

Fucking.

Damn.

It.

I sighed. I really didn’t want to know the secrets of Derek’s malfunction. Or really, I didn’t want to care. But he was there like a fucking Gordian knot of issues all the time. What was I supposed to do? Ignore him? 

“I hate my brain.” 

Baby Derek looked up, startled from his brooding. I was about to wave him off when he got all tense and sharp at the edges. Without looking I knew Regular Derek was off in the periphery. Probably lurking, because of course he was. 

I twisted around, but he didn’t seem to notice me looking at him. He was staring to my left, at Baby Derek. There was none of the intense game face going on he had before, but something tight and sad. It still looked like he was motivated to pounce, which couldn’t be good, but didn’t make any sense. He looked fragile in a way, worse than when we’d been trapped in the pool and we were still figuring out what the kanima even was. He looked like he wanted to tear into his baby version. Self-hatred is one thing; this was something else. I was missing something.

Not that that was new, when it came to Derek. Sad. Inconvenient. Inconvenient and sad. 

Crapshack. Crapping crappington. 

“So, look,” I was talking to Baby Derek in a quiet voice, but the regular one could obviously hear me. “This is… a whole lot of weird and unexpected here. I mean, it’s not like they’ve got an extra bed just lying around and available. I mean, I don’t either, but my house has, you know, complete walls. And you can sleep in my bed. I’ve sleeping bagged it a ton when Scott comes over. Well, we switch off, but these are extenuating—like really, super duper extenuating—circumstances. It would probably just be easier that way.” 

Baby Derek looked confused, but also, ugh, kind of hopeful. “Are you asking me to sleep over at your house?” 

“Um, yeah. That’s what I said. It’d be easier. Right, dude?” I leaned back and looked at Regular Derek, eyeing me strangely. 

I almost thought he didn’t hear me, even though I knew that couldn’t be true, because he took so long to answer. But he nodded his head. “Yeah. It would be.” 

“Cool. Then tomorrow we’ll come back and hit up some research with Peter. In the daylight. Better.” 

Baby Derek nodded without saying anything. So did Big Derek. 

Aaand.

Then. 

Silence. 

“Ooookay. Scott! We’re leaving!” 

I packed up my slightly-disgruntled-and-pretty-creeped-out-from-having-to-spend-four-minutes-alone-with-Peter Scott and my newly-traumatized-old-version-of-my-not-really-emergencies-only-buddy Baby Derek in the Jeep. And I did not look at Regular Derek standing outside the door broodingly watching us drive off. 

Nope.

I dropped Scott off at his house. He jumped out with another apologetic look that I waived off because, again, I knew about Scott’s very specific Derek allergy and his need to feel guilty about his stupid allergy every ten minutes. 

He sighed thankfully. Which, how do you do that?

“Seriously though. Call me if you need anything.”

Ugh. Principles. As if Scott is even accessible by phone. I swear his ring tone must only be audible when the moons of Jupiter align or to bats in Finland. 

“Yeah, go. It’s werewolf bedtime. Go read _Goodnight, Moon_.”

That earned me a weird look from both werewolves, which, okay, deserved. I was tired and my reservoir of werewolf jokes was getting low. 

“Whatever. Later, buddy.”

“Later, pal.” 

The remaining car ride with Baby Derek was silent. Awkward and silent. And sad. Baby Derek ran his nails over his jeans and occasionally sniffed a wet sniff. I didn’t know what to say. More incredibly, I felt like I couldn’t say anything. This seemed a lot more complicated than even the normal death-and-mayhem werewolf shenanigans we got into. There was a whole entire innocent person, granted a retrograde version of someone we all know, brought into this little bubble of pain and suffering called Beacon Hills. There was no aspect of it that was fair or easy. 

Best case scenario, really, Baby Derek would melt out of existence. Because if he were sent back, then what? Would it be better for him to forget learning about his entire family’s murder? If he didn’t somehow forget, like some internal time travel retcon, and somehow saved them, would anything be better off for everyone else? 

I for one seriously doubted that there was a magic erase button to the terrible events of the past. If Baby Derek went back to his time and saved his family, Kate would still be alive. And stopping her from killing the Hales would not stop her from being a serial killing vigilante. 

And what if Baby Derek could never go back? What if he was just forced to live out the rest of his life in succession with Regular Derek, knowing a glimpse at a terrible future but never living it, never having his own life? If the trauma of the Hale murders brought on Baby Derek made him innocent, what did that make Regular Derek?

There were too many factors. There was no way to safely predict an outcome. It was too hard to wade through. 

It made me nervous. 

I showed Baby Derek my bedroom window and the eve that I was pretty sure Scott and Derek used to get in my room when they were breaking and entering. Dad was home and I had absolutely no idea of how to lie about this situation. I was just too fried. 

I breezed past Dad, trying to keep talking the whole time about how bad I did trying to get goals past Scott in out summertime lacrosse scrimmages, about how I saw a poster for that movie with that chick, and how I was beat. It was easier to distract him with vaguely untrue ephemera so he wouldn’t have an opening to talk about real things. Though I knew it was only a matter of time before he made an opening. 

At least that part about me being tired was true. 

When I got to my room, Baby Derek was standing near the window, looking small and tired and defeated. Without the stubble, without the prominence of older Regular Derek’s jaw, I could definitely see how Derek’s face was never supposed to look that sad all the time. He had a face that was made for smiling. I guess I just never realized why Derek’s sarcastic mocking smiles looked so mocking. 

There was a certain amount of sneaking down the hallway for bathroom trips, but given Derek’s wolfy hearing we were pretty safe. 

I came back to my room, carrying my sleeping bag from the linen closet, full of nighttime meds, a fresh minty mouthfeel, and a bone deep desire to hit the hay. Baby Derek was wearing my old Gundam shirt and red plaid boxers—which apparently fit Baby-him perfectly—and sitting awkwardly on the edge of my bed. I untied my sleeping bag, rolled it on the floor, and pulled one of the pillows off the bed. 

I hesitated, because this whole thing was weird, and couldn’t say _put yourself into a reclining position now and close your eyes_. But I did edge toward my desk lamp and say, “well, okay. I’m going to sleep now.” 

“Do you want me to—?” He trailed off but was clearly aiming for the sleeping bag.

“No. Nah. That’s okay. It’s—You’ve had a rough day.” As though my bed were going to compensate for appearing in the future and learning your whole family was dead. “Just take the bed.”

Thankfully he just nodded and got into bed, turning towards the wall.

It normally took me a long time to get to sleep. And that night was no exception because fuck everything. The weird knew part was, however, being fairly confident that the relative stranger sleeping in my bed was also tensely awake most of the time too. And we were both awake and both freaked out and not acknowledging it. 

Whoever said I could never be quiet clearly never saw me trying to avoid uncomfortable emotional situations. Then I was silent as the grave. 

At some point I did fall asleep. And Baby Derek must have too because the next thing I knew I was being woken up in the dark of night to the sound of a dog whimpering. Of course, it was Derek having a nightmare. 

I scrambled up the bed before I could really see and hit my shin on the sideboard, half falling into it. 

“Ah, shit, shit, shhh, ssshhhh,” I said mostly to myself, but upon interrogation I would deny that. 

When my eyes settled I saw that Derek was kinda wolfed out. He was gripping my blanket tightly and biting into his own lip with his fangs. He was obviously agitated, making that sad dog-cry sound. I awkwardly patted his shoulder. 

“Hey, hey, shhh,” I whispered. “It’s okay. Derek.” 

He got worse and louder for a second. So with full fear and stupidity in my heart, I grabbed one of his hands, hoping he wouldn’t claw me waking up, and squeezed down hard on his wrist. He snapped up quickly. I braced myself for a mauling, but it never got past Baby Derek throwing his arms around me and tucking his face into my neck. 

Once I realized that he was going to keep crying and not bite me, I relaxed a little. Then after it was clear he wasn’t going to stop crying or let go of me, I tensed up again. But I put my free hand on his shoulder and moved it in a circle. 

“Shh, it’s okay. Breathe.” I rambled in comforting nonsense for a while—I was semi-fluent in comforting nonsense—until his shoulders started to ease up a little. And his claws and teeth, which I’d been aware of but hadn’t felt at all cutting me, receded against my skin. 

Baby Derek breathed in wetly against my skin. “I’m sorry.”

I tried to shrug to effect some sense of nonchalance, but neither of those things are possible when there’s a crying, traumatized 140-pound werewolf hugging you for dear life. 

“That’s fine,” I said instead. 

“I’m sorry,” he said anyway. 

We stayed like that for a long time after. Long enough that my shirt started to get cold and dry, even though his face was still on top of all the crying wet spot. Long enough that we both started to drift off and snap awake again because it’s strange to fall asleep on someone in a semi-upright position. 

“Can you—“ Derek said, quietly, almost squeaky, like he was embarrassed. Likely because he was totally embarrassed. 

He never finished his thought, but I knew what he meant. I didn’t really want to. It was weird. But saying no felt super dickish given the circumstances. 

“Sure.” 

I swung my legs over and laid back on the bed. Derek didn’t exactly keep hugging me. He let go, but still kept a hand curled around my forearm. 

“I’m sorry. It’s… my pack. I’m sorry.” 

“Shh. It’s fine. I get it.” 

“Good. I mean, thanks. I’m sorry.” 

“Okay, shut up now.”

I really was trying to be nice and cushiony to Baby Derek, considering the difficulty of the day he’d just had, but I’d been on quite the roller coaster myself. So I felt kinda bad. I reached out, letting my hand find his neck and then the side of his face. And I just touched him there, with fingers feeling out his pulse, like my Dad did to me when I was on the verge of losing my shit. 

“It’s really alright. Just try to sleep now, okay?” 

He nodded into my hand and I ruffled his hair just to show I was pleased with his silence. I sighed into my pillow, unknowing but pretty certain there was a Baby Derek, like, two inches from my face. Which was too close, but what could I do? He was clutching my arm like it was precious and we’d just gotten over a trauma-induced nightmare. 

But I felt totally awake and wasn’t at all ready to fall asleep again. 

Naturally the next thing I knew, I had this overwhelming feeling that I should wake up. 

It was totally silent, but when I opened my eyes the room was light, there was a Baby Derek nuzzling against my neck again, and my Dad was looming above me with an expression that was equal parts confused, concerned, and disapproving. 

“Is there something you want to explain to me, Stiles?” 

God. _Damn_. It.

**Author's Note:**

> ~*~
> 
> I'm not done with this yet, so I can't say when the next update will be. We'll see how it goes.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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